If you’re like me and are a DBA in the UK with a penchant for
MySQL or Oracle, you’ll know we have a smörgåsbord of conferences
here next week. We’ve been waiting, and like buses two have come
at once. We have the UK Oracle User Group Conference 2012, in
Birmingham on 3rd – 5th [...]

A client of ours is just getting started with Amazon Relational
Database Service (RDS) and I wonder as time marches on how
popular this cloud solution is going to play out for them and
Amazon as a valid/useable service offering. Many times in the
past we have encountered off-the-shelf solutions from vendor A
based on [...]

Another good day today: I attended the keynotes and found them
quite interesting.

I especially liked the way Twitter uses MySQL to build up a NoSQL
solution. Jokes aside, I took a few notes on things I must
analyze and dig in.

The introduction of the Paypal models seemed very interesting,
which brought me to attend the presentation later on. It was well
constructed and had some good theoretical work, but I was quite
disappointed. I found the presentation incomplete and missing
real numbers for the MySQL Cluster NDB setup.

I attended the presentation done by Ronald B. It was good —
nothing really advanced, but it was on purpose. He was very
informative and explanatory for a junior MySQL DBA, and I enjoyed
his presentation for the logical approach and construction.

Ronald also highlighted that it was the content of less then a
chapter of one of his books and was done on purpose to give an
initial understanding of …

I attend five sessions today, and I think that some of them were
very interesting, like the one on the Optimizer insight. It was
quite informative and accurate.

Another one, done by the MySQL Cluster (NDB) group on the
installer and new Javascript API interface, left me a little
bit…foggy. Why? Because in my mind, one of the most important
things to accomplish in NDB is the correct dimensioning of the
memory, buffers, possible operation, attributes, and so on. All
these things should come from the schema definition review and
from the application analysis.

Now given the review analysis of the schema is still not present
in the installer, I think that we missed a very important piece
of information. When I raised the issue, Bernd mentioned
that they were thinking of integrating that as well. It’s a good
move, and I hope to see it soon. About the JavaScript API,
I honestly think this was a real waste of …

I’m excited to be here not only to catch up with old friends and
ex-colleagues, but also to witness what seems to be the start of
a very significant conference from MySQL.

I really enjoyed the introductions done by Edward Screven and
Thomas Ulin. Edward highlighted the fact that MySQL is
increasing its presence in the market and in the
community. This could be thanks to the unbelievable effort
done by Oracle in keeping its production cycle on target. Thomas
stressed that point and gave a great description of it. He
demonstrated Oracle’s main focus points, which are mainly on
InnoDB, with implementation and enhancement of the
internal contentions, then on Optimizer improvements and
NoSQL integration.

Replication remains a pending issue from my side because if we
have the global transaction ID, we still suffer from delay
in replication given that parallel replication is still working
by, schema and not …

Every time I have had the pleasure of attending Oracle Open
World, I have discovered a plethora of technical heavy-weights
from all over the world in attendance. I enjoy meeting and
shmoozing with these people almost as much as absorbing the
technical content of the show itself. Many of my Pythian
colleagues are presenting at [...]

In honor of our fifteenth anniversary, I have assembled a few
nostalgic items from our earliest years in business.

On September 7, 1997 I went to the Ottawa U public library to
come up with some names for the company Steve Pickard and I
wanted to found the next morning. The goal was to choose the
company name, register the dot-com, and then go incorporate it. I
really felt that I lucked out when I discovered the word Pythian,
which means “about the Pythia“.
The Pythia was the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. (Remember
that we launched as an Oracle ecosystem services company, and our
other practices came afterwards with MySQL launching in 2002 and
SQL Server launching in 2005).

I was also delighted that the Pythian Games were also hosted by the Pythia, and
those were the most important …

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s
true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air,
particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to
Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source
companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised
how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time
defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That
didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in
particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that
didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built
around development of their own open source products. There are a
surprising number of them out there, especially relating to
multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …

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